| TeraCloud
Announces Availability of Free Fibre Channel Ping Utility |
BELLEVUE, WA.- July 7, 2003 - TeraCloud
Corporation announced today the availability of a free Fibre Channel Ping
utility (fcping).
Ffcping v1.5, is the Fibre Channel equivalent of
the standard IP networking utility PING, written by the late Mike Muuss. By
sponsoring this free open source tool, TeraCloud demonstrates its commitment to
helping storage administrators continue to increase the efficiency and
effectiveness of their storage environments.
Fcping, the world's first PING utility for Fibre Channel Networks, is
authored by Dr. Bill Pierce, director of software architecture at TeraCloud and
an expert in storage area networks. An active member of the SNIA SMI-S standards
technical team and the SNIA management application technical work group, he
released version 1.0 along with an article on the utility in the September 2002
issue of SysAdmin. Created in 1983, the original IP PING utility was adopted by
the UNIX community and became one of the most popular and important programs for
troubleshooting IP networks. In recognition of the utility's significance, its
creator, Mike Muuss, received the USENIX Association Lifetime Achievement Award
in 1993.
"Fibre Channel SANs help IT staff solve one of their greatest
challenges today, managing exponentially growing terabytes of data," said
Dr. Pierce. "fcping v1.5 is a simple, essential and familiar tool for
storage administrators who need to monitor and troubleshoot FibreChannel SANs. "
...TeraCloud profile
StorageTek Expands Virtual Storage Manager Capabilities
LOUISVILLE,
Colo. - July 7, 2003 - Customer demand has helped make StorageTek's
Virtual Storage Manager the most popular virtual tape storage solution on the
market.
And now, VSM 4 offers even more capacity at greater speeds
and with more connectivity options - saving businesses even more resources while
managing their data centers. With VSM 4, customers in mainframe environments can
achieve breakthrough gains in storage performance, capacity, connectivity,
resource utilization and overall functionality to help them manage data growth
more efficiently and cost-effectively.
"StorageTek believes that businesses must have the right
information on the right device at the right price and time in order to
successfully and cost-effectively manage their business," said Gary
Francis, StorageTek corporate vice president and general manager, Automated Tape
Solutions. "The new performance and functionality enhancements built into
VSM 4 help customers make the most of their current investments and allow them
to maximize their existing infrastructure. At the same time, VSM 4 offers a wide
range of flexible disaster recovery/business continuity features - and DR/BC is
certainly one of the biggest IT concerns faced by businesses today."
According to a report issued in April 2003 by Gartner Dataquest,
titled "Enterprise Virtual Tape Subsystem Magic Quadrant," StorageTek
has been the leader in virtual tape subsystem unit shipments since 2001. "Virtual
tape technology delivers on numerous value propositions to enable mainframe
enterprises to achieve advanced storage performance and increased resource
consolidation," said Nick Allen, vice president of Storage Research at
Gartner.
...StorageTek
profile
Storability Software Claims Leadership Position in SRM
Southborough,
Massachusetts - July 7, 2003 - Storability Software today celebrated
its three-year anniversary and its first full year as a pure software solution
provider.
Storability claims it has become the dominant
enterprise storage resource management vendor by virtue of its unmatched Fortune
500 customer base, superior Global Storage Manager product offering, world-class
partners, and accolades from leading industry analysts.
"We have transformed our business from a services delivery model
to a pure software vendor, in spite of an incredibly difficult market. We've
continued to win new customers, expand our product offering, and secure new
partners while many of our competitors struggle," said Tim Leisman,
Storability Software CEO. "This is a stunning achievement and has
positioned us as the leader in the growing storage resource management market.
We are poised to capitalize on new opportunities better than anyone else as the
economy improves and IT spending increases."
Storability burst
onto the storage scene in 2000 with the industry's first on-site automated,
customizable, managed storage services. Today, Storability Software says it is
the leading provider of SRM software solutions. Its robust Global Storage
Manager software is installed at industry leaders around the globe and the
company has repeatedly earned top rankings in independent assessments by
respected industry analysts. No other SRM vendor has announced a customer base
comparable to Storability's. One industry analyst called Storability's major
multi-year deal with Deutsche Bank "the biggest deal in the enterprise
storage management market to date."
...Storability
Software profile
Tabernus Article published today on Storage Software Tools for
Defense Systems Integrators
editor:- July 7, 2003 -
a new article is published today on STORAGEsearch.com by Lakewood
Colo. based Tabernus, LLC called "Storage Software Tools for
Defense Systems Integrators".
Software operates equally well
in an air conditioned office or the heat of the desert. So it may appear to a
casual observer that the needs of civilian and military systems integrators for
storage software drivers and integration utilities are very similar. But there
are important differences in the operational requirements for military systems
which means that systems integrators in the defense industry have subtly
different needs for storage software, even when they are using COTS hardware,
which utilizes "standard" interfaces like SCSI. This article provides
an overview of products and services which address these issues. ...read the article,
...Tabernus profile
LSI Logic DMN-8600 shipping in Zenith DVD recorder systems
Milpitas,
Calif. - July 7, 2003 - Extending its successful partnership with LG
Electronics, LSI Logic Corporation today announced that its
DiMeNsion 8600 DVD recorder processor is now shipping in the Zenith DVR313 line
of DVD recorder products in the U.S.
A worldwide leader in
consumer electronics, Korea-based LG Electronics selected the DMN-8600 for its
ability to provide the highest-quality digital video and distinctive features in
a cost-effective, single-chip design. Zenith DVR313 DVD recorders will be
offered at manufacturer's suggested retail price of $499. The DMN-8600 supports
transcoding between DV and MPEG formats, enabling the Zenith DVR313 to have
easy-to-use, one remote control of a DV camcorder over FireWire. This allows the
user to watch personal content from the DV camcorder while simultaneously
recording to a DVD disc. ...LSI Logic profile
Oxford Semiconductor recruits VP of Sales
Abingdon, UK - July 3,
2003 - Oxford Semiconductor has appointed Antoine Michaud as VP of
Sales.
Based at the company's Abingdon (UK) Head Quarters, he
will focus on maintaining Oxford's continuous growth in the multimedia
consumer electronics sector. Michaud arrives at Oxford semiconductor with
in-depth experience of component and test equipment sales in the telecom
industry. He is a former EMEA Director of Sales of fibre optic specialist
EXFO. ...Oxford
Semiconductor profile
More than 50% of Regulated Companies May Be Noncompliant with
Email Archiving Legislation
ARLINGTON,
Texas- July 3, 2003 - A new study by Osterman Research, Inc.
co-sponsored by KVS, Inc. and EMC Corp shows many companies in
regulated industries mistakenly believe regulations governing email retention do
not apply to them, placing them at greater risk of costly legal exposure and
loss of critical information.
Osterman Research surveyed 100
North American organizations that serve a variety of industries, including
financial services, government, and life sciences, ranging in size from 500 to
150,000 email users. The survey was conducted March 10 - March 27, 2003 using
Web-based questionnaires.
89% of the organizations surveyed are in industries that require email
retention, such as financial services. However, just 29% of those regulated
companies believe they have a legal requirement to retain email for a minimum
period. Only 57% of all 100 organizations have an email retention policy in
place, and in most cases, these policies still do not meet regulatory
requirements. The oldest email that can be restored is an average of 298 days,
or 10 months. This falls well short of the requirements established by the SEC
and some of the much longer retention periods required by the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Most industry regulations also demand
that companies store information in a non-deletable format, but more than half
surveyed have no mechanism in place to prevent users from deleting messages that
must be kept long-term.
"Lack of proper email management in a regulated company can
result in severe penalties," says Mike Hedger, CEO, KVS. "Last
December, for instance, the SEC fined five Wall Street brokerages a total of
$8.25 million primarily because they did not retain emails for the required time
period. Yet, this survey shows many companies are still risking similar fines
and damage to their reputations."
Aside from the legal ramifications, doing business without a
comprehensive archiving policy severely strains a company's financial and human
resources. Osterman Research found many companies with email archiving in place
do not have the means to quickly search for and produce specific emails. On
average, restoring the oldest email currently retrievable would require 9.6
person-hours - more than a full day of staff time to find just one email.
...EMC profile,
...KVS profile,
...Osterman Research
M-Systems Introduces World's Smallest 1-Gigabit Flash-Based
Storage for Mobile Devices
FREMONT,
Calif. - July 3, 2003 - M-Systems today introduced the 1-gigabit
Mobile DiskOnChip G3, its second Multi-Level Cell NAND-based product, storing
two bits of information in a single cell.
At only 9x12x1.2mm,
this is the world's smallest high-capacity NAND-based storage solution. The new
product will be sampling in October 2003 and go into mass production in December
2003. Like other DiskOnChip flash disk products it will be marketed jointly by
M-Systems and Toshiba.
Mobile handsets and PDAs, especially those with
large color screens, speakers and cameras, are sensitive to power consumption,
which is a growing issue within the mobile device industry. M-Systems' Mobile
DiskOnChip delivers power consumption as low as 10mA in active mode and 10uA in
deep power down mode. Because of M-Systems' proprietary x2 technology, it
consumes even less power than the NAND media it is based upon, helping to
increase time between recharges.
"With the expected growth of the
high-end and multimedia phone segments we anticipate an increasing need for
storage," said Richard Gordon, principal analyst for
Gartner Dataquest's
semiconductor research group. "Applications such as video on demand,
multimedia messaging and other advance features are driving manufactures to
incorporate larger capacities of high-performance flash memory within their
designs." ...M-Systems
profile
Softek Integrates Emulex HBAnyware Centralized Management Suite
COSTA MESA, Calif. - July 2,
2003 - Emulex Corporation announced today that Softek will
incorporate support for the Emulex HBAnyware into its SANView fabric manager
software.
The Emulex HBAnyware support will augment the advanced
management capabilities of Softek SANView, allowing it to provide increased
depth of information on host servers, HBAs and their relationship to the other
storage network devices.
Softek SANView is software that monitors the health and performance of
SAN-connected devices so that outages can be diagnosed and avoided. Through
automatic discovery, the software travels into the SAN, identifies each of the
various devices and then draws the topology. It is one of the fastest and
easiest ways to automatically discover, monitor and proactively manage SAN asset
performance and connectivity.
Emulex's HBAnyware is a centralized HBA management suite that
dramatically simplifies SAN management and lowers total cost of ownership.
HBAnyware incorporates driver-based technology to enable complete management of
Emulex HBAs, including the ability to upgrade firmware anywhere in a Fibre
Channel or iSCSI SAN from a single console. ...Emulex profile.
...Fujitsu Softek profile
Adaptec Reports Preliminary First Quarter Results in Line with
Projections
MILPITAS,
Calif. - July 2, 2003 - Adaptec, Inc. (Nasdaq: ADPT) today announced it
expects first-quarter bottom-line results in the middle of the range projected
in the company's conference call April 28.
The company expects to
report revenue for the first quarter of approximately $107 million, below the
projected range of $115-$120 million. Adaptec will also report a one-time $49.3
million gain from the May 2003 settlement with the former president of
Distributed Processing Technology Corp. (DPT), a company Adaptec acquired in
1999.
"Our expectation for a strong business upturn in June failed to
materialize as continuing economic uncertainty created unusually difficult
selling conditions worldwide," said Robert N. Stephens, Adaptec chief
executive officer. "At the same time, we continue to closely manage
operations and spending and we expect results will be in line with our
projections."
...Adaptec profile
EMC Acquires Rights to BMC Software's PATROL Storage Manager
Hopkinton,
Mass., and Houston, Texas - July 2, 2003 - EMC Corporation and BMC
Software, Inc. today announced a global sales, marketing and technology
partnership.
At the foundation of this partnership, EMC has
acquired rights to BMC Software's PATROL Storage Manager software, and BMC
Software will resell EMC's ControlCenter family of products as its exclusive
storage resource management offering through its MarketZone program.
Joe Tucci, EMC's President and CEO, said, "The partnership with
BMC marks our first reseller arrangement with an independent software provider
to market EMC ControlCenter as their storage resource management offering on an
exclusive basis. This deal is indicative of the significant investments EMC has
made to deliver the world's most functional, open, heterogeneous storage
software. Our industry-leading ControlCenter family will enhance and complement
BMC's leading enterprise systems management and services offerings. Customers
will benefit both from BMC's deep knowledge at the server and application level
and from EMC's expertise at the storage and storage network level, providing an
end-to-end management solution handling nearly every layer of the IT
infrastructure."
Both companies intend to tightly integrate the EMC ControlCenter
family of open storage management software with BMC Software's PATROL products,
providing customers with a comprehensive, end-to-end systems and performance
management solution.
...BMC Software profile,
...EMC profile
QLogic SANbox2-64 Switch Certified for Use with Quantum Tape
Libraries and Drives
ALISO
VIEJO, Calif. - July 1, 2003 - QLogic Corp. today announced its new
SANbox2-64 switch has been certified for use with the entire line of ATL tape
libraries, the DX30 disk-based enhanced backup system, and DLTtape drives from
Quantum Corp.
Introduced in April, the SANbox2-64
incorporates the same architecture as QLogic's award-winning SANbox2 16 port
switch for seamless plug-compatibility with servers, storage, switches and
software certified with SANbox2 16-port switches. The unique architecture of the
SANbox2-64, which features a 4U single chassis that allows hot-swapping of
8-port switch blades, can be easily scaled from 16 to 64 ports in increments of
8. The SANbox2-64 cost-effectively eliminates the cumbersome cabling and
management of multi-switch fabrics and doesn't sacrifice precious ports for
inter-switch links. With dual redundant power supplies and fans for high
availability, the SANbox2-64 products can also be configured in redundant pairs
to offer 99.999% availability for mission-critical applications.
"The
QLogic SANbox2-64 offers our storage customers a low-cost, robust connectivity
solution that complements our high-performance data protection systems,"
said Mike Hardy, vice president of strategic alliances of Quantum's Storage
Solutions Group. "Together, QLogic and Quantum are addressing the data
protection needs of small businesses, large corporate workgroups and departments
- easily and affordably."
...QLogic profile,
...Quantum profile
STMicroelectronics Introduces World's Smallest Embedded
Flash Memory
Geneva - July
1, 2003 - STMicroelectronics has announced the immediate availability
of the world's first volume production embedded Flash memory in advanced 180nm
CMOS technology.
ST's 180nm embedded Flash technology offers the
world's smallest cell size, with each Flash cell occupying just 0.37um2. The
extremely small cell size greatly reduces the silicon area required to build
memory arrays on the chip, thereby reducing the chip manufacturing cost. The
new technology is particularly suited for automotive applications, where
Embedded Flash is widely used in System-on-Chip (SoC) solutions for key
functions such as engine management units as well as for navigation and
Infotainment systems. Demonstrator chips featuring these cores are already
undergoing customer qualification for the full automotive temperature range.
...STMicroelectronics
profile
The Top 5 Subjects on StorageSearch.com in Q203
Editor:- July 1,
2003 - the Solid State
Disks (SSD) page was the number #1 product category out of more than 60
storage focused directories visited by StorageSearch.com in the quarter
ending June 30, 2003 according to publisher ACSL.
10 years ago
when we first featured SSDs in our old print directory, SSDs were an obscure
subject only of interest to the
military. They were
too expensive for use by commercial organizations. But as SSD costs have reduced
inline with memory prices, and disk drive performance has improved at a much
slower rate during the past decade than CPU speeds, users have become more aware
that system performance doesn't come from the processor alone. Two years ago
SSDs were the 18th most popular subject on StorageSearch and the subject has
been creeping up the popularity chart and got as high as the #2 spot in Q1
2003. That's where I thought it would stay. How could it go higher? But I was
wrong...
It's interesting to speculate why SSDs are becoming so
important in the thinking of storage users. My own view is that as most
organizations have now engineered their storage assets towards a network
accessible model, there's a growing realisation that solid state disks are a
vital part of making these systems work
effectively. In most networked storage systems faster application
performance can be achieved by tweaking storage hot spots using SSDs at a much
lower cost than simply adding more processors. The potential for speed ups will
increase as the gap between processor speed and rotating magnetic disk access
times continues to widen. Here are the top 5 subjects visited by our readers in
Q2:
- Solid
state disks
- Serial ATA
- NAS
- Backup
software
- iSCSI
Solid
State Disks are an important market already, and I believe the SSD segment has
the potential to become a $10
billion market as IT buyers switch a significant percentage of their IT
budgets from underperforming expensive servers into acceleration technologies
like SSDs. To help you get a better feel for what's available and how much it
costs, we contacted all the manufacturers in this market in June to compile a
definitive SSD buyers guide which will include budgetary pricing and sample
product information across the full price spectrum. It will be published mid
July. Until then the SSD
directory page will take you to most of the significant suppliers in this
market. ...ACSL
profile
The World's Fastest Storage from Texas Memory Systems Boosts
Application Performance upto 25X
Houston,
Texas - July 1, 2003 - Texas Memory Systems, Inc. announced the release
of its new RamSan-320 solid state disk storage unit.
The
RamSan-320 demonstrates a 2x-5x performance leap over existing solid state disks
and a
10x-25x performance enhancement over existing RAID storage. With higher
performance at a lower cost than other solid state disk units, the RamSan-320 is
an attractive solution to most I/O bottlenecks where transaction and storage
response times are critical. Applications that benefit include online
transaction processing, online analytical processing, modeling, and heavy-duty
video servers. Typical RamSan-320 users include corporations in the financial,
telecom, broadcasting, and e-commerce sectors as well as government, military,
and research organizations.
When customers move data requiring frequent and high performance
access, such as database 'hot' files, to the RamSan-320, their applications
accelerate. Because the RamSan stores data in SDRAM, data reads and writes
occur instantaneously. This fast access dramatically improves overall
throughput and query response time. The RamSan's amazing 3,000 MB per second
bandwidth and 250,000 IOPs (sustained) mean that it can simultaneously
boost performance for multiple servers.
|
 |
The RamSan-320 includes several
exclusive features that make it the most reliable solid state disk available.
While other solid state storage manufacturers use a single back-up hard drive,
the RamSan-320 is the only SSD that uses a three-disk RAID back-up system, in
addition to internal batteries, component redundancy, and hot-swap capabilities,
for added data protection. This is a significant advance in reliability for 24
X 7 data center operations with critical applications. Texas Memory Systems has
added a unique Active Backup feature that allows users to simultaneously benefit
from a solid state drive's blazing fast read and write performance and from hard
disk drives' secure data protection.
The optional Active Backup mode
uses performance not utilized by the application to constantly backup memory
across three back-up hard disk drives. "Solid state disk solutions are
valued for performance rather than capacity," said Woody Hutsell, Executive
Vice President with Texas Memory Systems. "However, critical system
applications and associated data files are growing, giving rise to larger solid
state disk systems. This makes a more intelligent form of data backup
essential."
Engineering advances by Texas Memory Systems have significantly
reduced the cost of this high performance storage, resulting in unprecedented
value that enables IT managers to lower the total cost of owning and running
data centers. A customer investing in a 16-Gigabyte RamSan-320 achieves a cost
of $0.14/IOPS. In addition, this 8th generation solid state storage system
lowers IT manager's total cost of ownership by boosting application performance
without the complexity and additional cost of adding servers and application
software licenses.
"We were able to reduce I/O bottlenecks using RamSan solid state
disks," said David Hu, System Administrator with the Bureau of Labor
Statistics. "That allowed us to reduce user application wait time up to
40%."
The RamSan-320 fits seamlessly into a SAN. It provides up to
64-Gigabytes of SDRAM storage in a single 3U rack mount chassis and is easily
managed using a secure Telnet, browser interface, or standard SNMP software.
The RamSan-320 unit includes from two to eight 2-Gigabit Fibre Channel ports,
hot-swappable disk drives and power supplies, redundant batteries and fans. The
Texas Memory Systems RamSan-320 is immediately available in USA and Canada.
...Texas Memory
Systems profile | |
